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Don't give the Thanksgiving hometown high school reunion cold shoulder.

In two weeks my fellow transient peers and I will travel back to our respective hometowns to rejoin our families for the greatest holiday all year. Think about it: Thanksgiving out ranks all other holidays with its guaranteed four day weekend. It beats Christmas because there's no last-minute-mall-dashing madness. And it's got the national unity like July 4th - something that every American is joined together in celebrating. But that's not to say that the 4th Thursday in November is without its faults.

In my hometown, aside from rejoining the family, I also rejoin what-feels-like the majority of the people I went to high school with. Wednesday night, the cultural expectation is that you will be at Duffers, the local bar. Consequently, you will see people you have forgotten about. Although you spent the better half of your life with these people, they have somehow fallen out of the picture. This in-of-itself, isn’t the problem. What irks me is the uncertainty of whether or not to break the ice with these people. After all, why bother engaging in conversation with someone you made your peace with? At the same time, it’s impossible to ignore the former relationships we had. So at the very least, I usually enter in the same post-high school banter just as a social gesture.

View pics from last year's Thanksgiving bar scene

I know I’m not alone in this position. The usual reply to “Will I see you at Duffers” is “Yeah, but all of Garnet Valley will be there.” And its not like we despise these people. It's recognizing we’ll have to bear the unease of meeting people we haven’t seen in years. After high school, we whittled our cliques down to the most essential constituents. Trying to reconnect is tough. Now that the one thing that united us is gone, sometimes the only thing to reaffirm our past connection is Facebook.

Have you ever had that conversation? "Hey, well we're Facebook friends, right?" "Um, I don't know" . . . . "oh" That's embarrassing. And what do you do - once you get back to your computer, do you immediately be-friend them - or do you remember why you never did it in the first place. Here are the people that we grew up with, but we have never had enough interest in the other to be-friend them on Facebook. Granted, a Facebook-friendship is most likely the thinnest bond of a relationship, but it still counts for something.

What's most upsetting is how we'll disregard our shared histories. Given my high school was so small, I could most likely reel off two good stories about any one person I graduated with. Yet this sort of conversation is avoided. I suppose now that we're grown up (yeah right) discussing that ridiculous video project we did for some class in 8th grade is just immature. Instead we'll gloss over the usual phatic communication. How are you doing/Where do you live now/Yes, I'm doing very well/Good to see you. Oh c'mon, no one enjoys that. I say we bring back all the good stuff:

Remember how you threw up just out of the blue in Mr. Stevenson's class?

She was the hottest student teacher in the Tri-state area

Did your parents ever find out about that shelf in the basement we reconstructed?

So recognizing that these oft-putting moments are unavoidable, maybe we can change things. I suggest breaking the ice with one people you kind of knew back then. If you two catch eyes, it's on. Make conversation and be interested. Reconnect and make it worth something. Just this one person, and you can go back to blowing off the rest.